Society loves to dichotomize every aspect of our daily life

  Peijean Tsai Tsai’s evil half hopes you
will mindlessly conform to her opinions, while her good half wants
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My first official UCLA experience was freshman orientation. The
event metamorphosed me from a member of the peanut gallery into an
all-proud Bruin. I learned everything from academic tips to the
nine steps to properly use a condom, as well as the legends behind
the campus landmarks. But, the message the counselors repeatedly
pounded in my brain was the UCLA-USC rivalry. Being a Bruin was not
just about studying, working or partying; it was also about
loathing Trojan booty.

I remember coming here thinking, “But I have some friends
over at University of Scholastic Compromise; am I supposed to stop
being friends with them just because, as a Bruin, I should be
utterly anti-Trojan?”

The war with USC as our enemies till death do us part lacks any
real basis for rivalry. It is just the classic case of two
different sides enjoying opposition for the sake of opposition.
This is one example of how U.S. society aims to divide everything
into two groups, to clearly divide the enemy from the friend, to
categorize into black and white.

Similarly, the United States has always been divided into
clean-cut dichotomies with its government. In the 1700s, the
political system was divided into the Federalists, who supported a
strong central government, and the Anti-Federalists, who supported
individual state rights. The Civil War divided the North and South,
the abolitionists and non-abolitionists, and supporters of industry
and agriculture. These groups distinguished themselves with clearly
opposite views. After 1850, the Republican Party emerged, making
way for a dichotomy we still recognize today: that of the Democrats
and Republicans, liberals and conservatives.

  Illustration by JASON CHEN/Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Today’s twofold separation of government, however, seems to
be backed less by opposing beliefs than by the idea that we must be
pitted against one another for the sake of simply having enemies.
People often vote for a leader because he or she represents their
political party, not necessarily because they like the candidate.
The recent decision of Virginia’s Senator James Jeffords to
step down from his Republican slate and become an Independent
demonstrates how sometimes a person cannot identify themselves as a
member of one of two opposing groups.

Jeffords’ shift not only reveals his own set of beliefs,
but it has also led to one of the biggest brouhahas between
Democrats and Republicans in the history of the debate; the
division between the two groups is more distinct than ever.
Suddenly the government does not seem to be split so much by a
clear division of ideology, but rather by pettiness over which
group should dominate the Senate.

Jeffords did not switch to the Democratic Party, so he suddenly
became too liberal. The Republicans are panicking because his label
has been altered, and now the number of Democrats and Republicans
in the Senate is no longer split evenly. Though the Republicans
will likely lose influence in Congress, the fury of the Republicans
seems to be backed by a petty attempt to keep the two teams equal
so that there can be fair opposition.

With war, the conflict is usually also between two opposing
forces, rather than multiple sides battling against each other from
all directions. At the risk of oversimplifying, the world was
basically divided into two categories during World War II: the Axis
powers ““ Germany, Italy, Japan ““ and the Allied nations
““ Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States,
China.

Yet we could very well have had more than two political takes on
how government should be run. We could have had the mass of
countries who supported dictatorship or socialism, a group of
nations who believed in democracy, and a group that was fighting
for anarchic control. Wouldn’t that have made the war a lot
more interesting than just our nation versus the evil forces of
foreign governments?

Even childhood fairy tales brainwashed us with the idea that
there must be “good” and “evil” sides. We
learned that Snow White and the Smurfs represented everything good,
and the Evil Queen and Gargomel were evil in a bottle. But did we
ever stop to think about how pitiful that Evil Queen was, how
mentally unbalanced she must have been to poison an apple to murder
a young woman? No, we were taught to believe that both characters
were flat and one dimensional, either completely good or entirely
evil.

Movies are not much better at portraying gray, as opposed to
just black and white. The film “Pearl Harbor” recreated
a tragic moment in U.S. history and emphasized the distinct sides
of good versus evil, as personified by the United States and Japan.
The Japanese dropped the bomb on us, so they are the bad guys; we
are the innocent victims.

The film never presents the audience with what the our country
did in retaliation to this event: the atomic bombing of two
Japanese cities, the effects of which were just as deadly, if not
worse, than the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The film industry
therefore assumes that its audience is simple-minded and can only
handle watching a story with obvious good and evil sides, and
audiences seem to agree by paying to see these movies.

Categorizing oneself into one of two separate groups also aids
in self-definition, as is the case with the dichotomy between men
and women. Members of each sex can define themselves by traditional
gender roles, acting in either “typical” masculine or
feminine ways, including mainstream fashions.

While there may not be cookie-cutter molds for how all men or
all women should dress, the distinction between men’s and
women’s clothing is but one part of what distinguishes the
sexes. Without this clear-cut gender dichotomy, self-definition
becomes more uncertain as we must, heaven forbid, rely on
personality traits that make learning about each other a bit more
complicated.

Separating everything into two distinct categories may be a
simple way to look at things, but they seem to shortchange human
intelligence. The “good versus evil” phenomenon is a
subjective form of categorization, so to eliminate our capacity to
judge what we agree or disagree with belittles our abilities to
think for ourselves.

The idea that we cannot see conflicts in a more complicated
light slaps us with a bumper sticker of stupidity. Of course we are
always free to explore things in less simplistic manners. Instead
of looking at the world as good and bad, PC versus Mac, Beta versus
VHS, we should always see arguments and situations as more than
just two-dimensional.